Topic: Microsoft

Though Sony apparently held talks with Apple about debuting the film "The Interview" on iTunes, the movie is instead now available for rent on YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Live and Sony's own Crackle service for $5.99, while viewers can purchase the movie for $14.99.

A survey of 880 college students conducted last week by Chegg found 51 percent named Apple as their preferred smartphone, tablet and laptop brand while 46 percent named Beats as their top pick for headphones.

While it was Apple who for years targeted Windows switchers to the Mac platform, the tables have turned as now Microsoft is now the underdog, focusing its efforts on trying to win over MacBook users with its Surface Pro hybrid computers.

Apple was one of more than 50 private companies and trade associations to sign amicus briefs in support of Microsoft on Monday as the Redmond, Wash., company continues an ongoing court battle with the U.S. government over customer data privacy protections.

A vast and sophisticated new espionage campaign targeting "military, diplomats, and business execs," discovered by Blue Coat Labs and confirmed by Kaspersky Labs, exploits flaws in Microsoft Windows and seeks to infect Android, Blackberry and iOS devices, but is limited to only infecting iPhones and iPads that are jailbroken.

As Microsoft begins ramping up the holiday ad blitz for its Surface tablets, the software giant has kept Apple's MacBook Air squarely in the crosshairs, continuing its string of television spots that pit the two devices against each other.

The competitive price, strong feature set, and universal compatibility of the Microsoft Band will make it a compelling product for anyone in the market for a wearable fitness and health tracking device, though it does suffer from some of the expected shortcomings of a first-generation product.

Over the last two years, Intel's mobile chip division has lost $7 billion while heavily subsidizing the manufacturing costs of Android Atom tablet makers. It now plans to phase out those generous incentives, which will make it more expensive for iPad competitors to dump cheap tablets into the market.

Apple's A-series Application Processors that power iPads--including the latest and greatest A8X in iPad Air 2--are inciting billion dollar losses for Intel and threatening major problems for rival tablet chips from Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia, along with all the companies that depend upon those vendors for their mobile chips.

In keeping with the growing importance of Apple's iOS platform, Microsoft's new Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps for iPhone are now far superior than those Microsoft offers for its own Windows Phone 8 platform.

Dedicated versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, comprising the Microsoft Office suite, are now available for iPhone, based on a unified codebase with their iPad counterparts, and also offering both iPhone and iPad users the ability to create and edit documents for free without an Office 365 subscription.

In its ranking of electronic messaging systems for safety and security, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said no mainstream products passed all of its criteria, but that Apple's iMessage and FaceTime "stood out as the best of the mass-market options."

Apple's wildly popular MacBook Air remains in Microsoft's crosshairs as the Windows maker seeks to break Apple's stranglehold on the premium laptop market, this time compared to Lenovo's Yoga 3 convertible PC in Microsoft's latest television advertisement.